What Price Glory? Lynn Yaeger’s Adventures in Discount Shopping

“Is this the clothing store for Occupy Wall Street?” says my pal Michael Musto as soon as we enter Denim & Supply, the new Ralph Lauren shop on University Place. And indeed, the frayed dungaree jackets bearing faint remnants of the Stars and Stripes, the long Indian print dresses enhanced with tiny mirrors, the army jackets flaunting tapestry shoulder patches, the fluttery gathered batiste tops, do seem to evoke the bright spirit of Zuccotti Park.

The Denim & Supply line replaces the now-shuttered Ralph Lauren Rugby stores, something that personally makes me very sad, as I was a big Rugby fan, more readily seduced by monogrammed faux-college cardigans and stripey rep scarves, than I am by Woodstock-worthy shreds. But that’s just me. Maybe the country is more in the mood for raw-edged grunge at the moment, especially since the price point here is lower than Rugby’s. And not everything is rough and ready—there is also, for $145, a lacy dress that would be as welcome at a haute-bourgeois wedding as it would be at a May Day demonstration in Union Square.

My curiosity piqued as to what else is happening in the Ralph Lauren empire, I take a trip down to SoHo to check the company’s other outposts. Full disclosure: I am a huge sucker for Ralph. I love his quintessentially American story—the way this guy from the Bronx embraced all the previously exclusive talismans of upper-class life, even taking over that bastion of WASP glory, the Rhinelander mansion on Madison Avenue, and filling it with his Fair Isle pullovers and Daisy Buchanan frocks. Lauren has spent decades encouraging all of us to litter our parlors with masses of silver picture frames, polo mallets, beat-up leather suitcases, and other stuff we would likely never have in our own attics, even if we had an attic. He gave us permission to redefine ourselves as everything from ranchers to race-car drivers, and so what if we are only pretending? Isn’t that what fashion is all about?

But I digress. Back to the matter at hand: I stop briefly at the classic Ralph Lauren store housed in a historic cast-iron building on Prince Street, where a short flapper dress covered in bronze beads is $699; if that’s too steep, there are long, lithe cashmere cardigans in hues like sky-blue and banana, ready for a Cape Cod yachting holiday, or the D train to Coney Island, and currently marked down to $279.

Despite the fact that a massive decomposing antique American flag hangs from the wall at the Prince Street depot, I am far more enticed by the massive RRL emporium on West Broadway, with its rough plank floors, worn-to-near-extinction Oriental rugs and taxidermied animal heads (poor deer). This particular Lauren fantasy artfully blends authentic vintage garments with their RRL look-alikes, so a woman’s World War II army jacket ($445) hangs next to a Hawaiian printed dress, an RRL original that might have suited Donna Reed in From Here to Eternity, for $495. A mere $59 buys a perfect khaki tank-undershirt, an item that will gain surely in wardrobe significance as the hot weather approaches. And with the money you’ve saved, you could, in theory, top this with a fringed suede cropped jacket decorated with beaded blossoms, whose price—even marked down—is currently $1,539, which is far beyond the purview of this column. But then again, who can put a price on a dream?